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"So, how have you fit your art into your living space, life style and life changes?"  I was asked.

Well, my first real studio was a brick walled room that had been built along side the garage in England.  It was previously used as a game room for the children of the previous owners.  This room was flooded with light from large windows on two sides and the perfect place to play!   At last, a studio space!  My first studio was a creative space for ceramics , and in one small corner, a painting easle with a load of brushes and paints I'd inherited.  I knew what to do with ceramics.  I had been taking classes and had aquired a full studio including kiln and throwing wheel from a friend who was downsizing and moving.   The paints on the other hand, were strangers to me and it took friends who knew what to do with them to challenge me to pick up a brush.  I must admit, I was clumsy and awkward.  Disenchanted with my first effort, I put the brushes down almost as fast as I picked them up.

My first studio that involved drawing and painting came about many years later when I was middle aged and returned to the USA after  16 years in Europe.  It was in the corner of a studio apartment 'bedroom area' on a desk designated for that purpose.  Having downsized to make the "hop" back across the pond, my first accomodation was aptly called a "studio" apartment.    I was doing small works of art, mostly drawing, sketching, and working with oil pastels. The ceilings of the apartment were vaulted to at least 25 feet, so there was an abundance of wall space for such a small footprint.  The walls became my growing personal gallery.   Three months after my return, I took off on an adventure and spent eight weeks living aboard a sailboat in St. Lucia on my own.   I came back from that trip inspired to memorialize the places and experiences that I felt deeply connected with while I was there, and to do it through art.  I wanted to remember and never forget, and art seemed like the way to do that.   I was spilling over with inspiration, and filled the walls of my studio apartment. It didn't take long before it became evident that the space was no longer adequate, and I began looking for a larger home with space that could support my growing thirst for artistic expression.   I moved  into a lovely 2 bed condo where the second bedroom would function nicely as a small studio and I would have adequate space for my newly aquired second hand drafting table, paints, paper and other supplies.  I found my hobby had grown a little, and the new space accomodated it brilliantly.  I had a corporate career that consumed a great deal of  my time,  paid the bills and fed my art as a hobbyist.   I was drawing, using graphite, charcoal and oil pastels, and also began adding oil paints to my array of "toys".  My days were spent at work, my nights and weekends in the studio.  

  A couple years went bye and suddenly I found myself with a physical disability and not knowing if my life, as I knew it, was over or if there was a fix for the problem.  I had been doing powerlifting for a number of years, and something had gone "pop".  During that time I moved back home to the Sierra Foothills and spent 18 months paying rent to my Dad and occupying one room.   Again, as life would have it,  a corner was dedicated to my drafting table and art, until I recovered.  The disability made it impossible for me to sit, so I bought some cinder blocks, and raised my drafting table to standing height, so that I could continue "doing art".   I always found a way.

Eventually I recovered and returned to work.  I began looking to buy a house and in that plan was the idea of an even larger space for painting and art, ideally seperate from the central living areas of the home.   I found an amazing 3 bedroom house with two bonus rooms that were sizeable, seperate from the rest of the common living areas and the larger was an ideal studio.  It was a back porch that ran the width of the back of the house and had been enclosed.  At one end of the 16 x 25 foot expanse were glass windows with far reaching views to the coastal mountains. The other end of the room had been panelled with cork board which was perfect for a home gallery.   There was light & power and tons of room for tables, easels, and storage.  A dream come true, I had created this amazing space where I escaped regularly without imposing on the rest of the house.  

I lived in that space for a number of years, believing that I had found my "little bit of heaven on earth"  and all that was needed was someone to share it with. I'm often reminded that "life is what happens while you're making plans", and life began to happen and take some twists and turns I could not have imagined in a million years.   I've always said " the Universe has things planned for me far better than I ever could".  It had become my experience over and over again, and dontcha just know, every time I think I have things figured out, the Universe intervenes with a different plan for me.  This time, the love of my life (and now husband) showed up, and while my vision was that he would join me in my little eutopia of kayaking, hiking in the mountains,  photography and art, it seems the Universe had something else in mind that would require me to bend with the wind like a willow,  and, in time, it would require me to give up my little home in the hills and move first to Sacramento, and finally across the continent to live on the East Coast of the United States on the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland.    Before we moved East, we were married on a train, on Mount Shasta, and we settled in a small house in Sacramento where, again, I carved out a corner to paint and draw, and on weekends we would retreat to the "my house" in the foothills where my larger studio was.  I continued my corporate professional life until wildfire smoke created respiratory problems, and then molds, pollens and pollution were the proverbial "straw that broke the camel's back", and finally the fumes from my oil paints.   I felt somewhat doomed, yet again. 

I left my corporate career, and decided to pick up watercolors and somehow learn to make them as vibrant as possible.   It's amazing that even in the most difficult times, I always found a way and a place to "do art".  Eventually, during the Great Recession, we decided  that for the sake of our health and welfare, we should pick up stakes and move back East where my husband returned to his career and his familiar life near the Bay, and I began a new life where I could breathe, avoid wildfire smoke, and as always, find a place "in the corner" to make art.

  We were hold up in a 2 bedroom condo for nine months in Annapolis while we sold the house in Sacramento, and then we found a lovely home with an abundance of rooms......"space for art and a studio" thinks me!   Some would say we have a 4 bed  2.5 bath home.....I say we have a 2 bed, 1 office, 1 studio, 2.5 bath home.   Doing art takes space!  Lots of it!   As I've moved from hobbyist to "almost-fulltime" artist my space requirements continue to grow.  Now it's not just a corner needed for the odd creative impulse, it's the need for space to spread out, have several pieces on the go at the same time, space for matt cutter, framing, giclee printers and card printers, packaging  and a whole host of ancillary activities that have little to do with picking up a paint brush ! :-)  

Recently my husband recognized a little gleaming glint of inspiration percolating and ideating in my eyes when I suggested we build a shed in the corner of the back yard to store the "stuff" that occupies the garage.  The thought being, to convert the garage to a large studio where I could have the entire art business in one place away from the upstairs "day to day" of our personal lives.  It's almost impossible to invite guests to an upstairs bedroom studio.  We have never parked a car in the garage at the back of the house in the 6 years we've lived here, and I could see the perfect reason not to in the future.  I sat and envisaged glass sliding doors filling the space of the current 2 car garage door and morning light flooding in on light colored pergo floors,  overhead spot lights pointed at a slatwall gallery, and all the surfaces and storage spaces I could possibly need in one place.  And finally a kitty width size set of stairs running up the side wall to an overhead garage storage ceiling rack that has a thin carpeted plywood floor converted into a "kitty loft" for Amber, our new "studio cat".   I envisage this as my final studio where art and friends can come together,  and always in the back of my mind the wisdom of the Universe lurks, and I wonder.  

The shed arrives in two weeks, and after that, if the Universe agrees.......................